NEW GEORGIA
New Georgia was situated in Turner’s Wood to the north-east of the Spaniards tavern, Hampstead, and at the northern extremity of the road opposite the western lodge of Caen Wood. It was a wooden cottage, two storeys high, irregularly constructed, and standing in a wilderness and garden laid out “in a delightful romantic taste.” The proprietor, Robert Caston, built the cottage in 1737, and opened New Georgia to the public.
He was his own architect, builder, and gardener, and probably compared his labours to those of the founders of the American colony of Georgia established in 1733. An inscription on the cottage explained the origin of New Georgia as follows:—“I Robert Caston, begun this place in a wild wood, stubbed up the wood, digged all the ponds, cut all the walks, made all the gardens, built all the rooms, with my own hands; nobody drove a nail here, laid a brick or a tile, but myself, and thank God for giving me such strength, being sixty-four years of age when I begun it.”
Tea was supplied in the cottage or the gardens, but the chief attractions were a number of mechanical oddities set in motion in the garden and in the various little rooms into which the house was divided. London shopkeepers, like Zachary Treacle,[200] often made their way to the place on Sunday afternoons, and were diverted by reptiles that darted forth when a board or spring was trodden upon, by a chair that collapsed when sat upon, and by various contrivances of water-works.
The more boisterous, who on other Sundays delighted in a roll down the hill in Greenwich Park, found amusement in thrusting their heads into the New Georgia pillory to receive in that position the kisses of the ladies. A thickly-planted maze was another source of diversion.
The place does not appear to have been frequented after about 1758, and was subsequently (before 1795)[201] enclosed in the estate of Lord Mansfield.
[Gent. Mag. 1748, vol. 18, 109; The Connoisseur, No. 26, 25 July, 1754; The Idler, No. 15, 22 July, 1758; Lysons’s Environs, ii. 527; Lambert’s London (1806), iv. 255; Park’s Hampstead; Prickett’s Highgate, 72, ff. Walford, v. 446.]
VIEWS.
New Georgia is clearly marked in Rocque’s Survey, 1745, but there appear to be no views.